Ian Franklin of Delaware sent in this modest cassette, full of modest music, modest artwork, and one modest-as-fuck title. “I Guess” shrugs at me as I click play, the spools turning and into my eardrums strums the electric guitar of Shredderghost. You guess? I guess this is goddamn gorgeous, mister. The strings all strands of skeletal and spindly sound, shivering in the cold of a wintery universe where they, an amplifier, some pedals, and a tape machine all find themselves huddled in close for warmth. And a warmness, a glow emanates from it, one that beckons you closer, into its zone of psychedelic safety. I want very much to call this a new generation of folk musician, like Franklin, These Wonderful Evils, Insect Factory, Last Eyes, are all re-figuring the guitar and those powerfully pleasing melodies into twisting and turning new models by way of technology and amplification, electricity shocking the very core of genre, and the sounds thus unspooling over the course of a side of a tape. Few of these folks have refined the style into something I’m ready to call a masterpiece, but I Guess is nonetheless another Eureka!-piece of an assembling puzzle I’m putting together in my head, which warrants it repeated listens, if not just for the beautiful ambient buzzy bliss the album produces in its own right. Carry on Shredderghost… you guess… shit.
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